Landscape with houses and gardens

Details

We would like to thank Julia Pechstein, Hamburg, for her kind advice in cataloguing this work.

The watercolour is listed as a work by Max Pechstein in the documentation of the Max Pechstein Urheberrechtsgemeinschaft under the title “Landschaft mit Häusern und Gärten”, c. 1921/22.

Exhibition:

Max Pechstein, Galerie Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf 2012.

Provenance:

Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett Roman Norbert Ketterer, Stuttgart 3/4 May 1962, lot 374;

Private property, Southern Germany.

Description

– Watercolour showing a village view in Pomerania

– Pechstein found inspiration there in the picturesque landscape and the naturalness of rural life

– Freshly coloured, large-format watercolour

A large proportion of Max Pechstein’s most important landscape paintings were created on the Baltic Sea. The artist travelled there repeatedly over the decades. For example to the Curonian Spit, where he lived and worked for weeks and months on six occasions as a member of the Nidden artists’ group. Or to Pomerania, where he discovered the landscape around the small town of Leba not far from Gdansk in 1921. In the same year, he met his second wife Marta Möller there and they married two years later. Over the following decades, Leba and its surroundings became Pechstein’s second home; he cultivated intensive contacts with the local population and found numerous motifs for his works. The picturesque landscape, the light, the unspoilt nature and the naturalness of the people living there provided him with fertile inspiration for his art and formed a counterbalance to metropolitan life in Berlin.